Web object retrieval

ABSTRACT

The primary function of current Web search engines is essentially relevance ranking at the document level. However, myriad structured information about real-world objects is embedded in static Web pages and online Web databases. Document-level information retrieval can unfortunately lead to highly inaccurate relevance ranking in answering object-oriented queries. In this paper, we propose a paradigm shift to enable searching at the object level. In traditional information retrieval models, documents are taken as the retrieval units and the content of a document is considered reliable. However, this reliability assumption is no longer valid in the object retrieval context when multiple copies of information about the same object typically exist. These copies may be inconsistent because of diversity of Web site qualities and the limited performance of current information extraction techniques. If we simply combine the noisy and inaccurate attribute information extracted from different sources, we may not be able to achieve satisfactory retrieval performance. In this paper, we propose several language models for Web object retrieval, namely an unstructured object retrieval model, a structured object retrieval model, and a hybrid model with both structured and unstructured retrieval features. We test these models on a paper search engine and compare their performances. We conclude that the hybrid model is the superior by taking into account the extraction errors at varying levels.

REFERENCES

• 1: Ricardo A. Baeza-Yates , Berthier Ribeiro-Neto, Modern Information Retrieval, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1999
• 2: Deng Cai , Xiaofei He , Ji-Rong Wen , Wei-Ying Ma, Block-level link analysis, Proceedings of the 27th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, July 25-29, 2004, Sheffield, United Kingdom [doi>10.1145/1008992.1009068]
• 3: Deng Cai , Shipeng Yu , Ji-Rong Wen , Wei-Ying Ma, Block-based web search, Proceedings of the 27th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, July 25-29, 2004, Sheffield, United Kingdom [doi>10.1145/1008992.1009070]
• 4: James P. Callan, Passage-level evidence in document retrieval, Proceedings of the 17th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.302-310, July 03-06, 1994, Dublin, Ireland
• 5: J.P. Callan. Distributed information retrieval. In Advances in Information Retrieval: Recent Research from the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval, edited by W. Bruce Croft. Kluwer Academic Publisher, pp. 127--150, 2000.
• 6: Abdur Chowdhury, Mohammed Aljlayl, Eric Jensen, Steve Beitzel, David Grossman and Ophir Frieder. Linear Combinations Based on Document Structure and Varied Stemming for Arabic Retrieval. In The Eleventh Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2002), 2003.
• 7: Charles L. A. Clarke, Controlling overlap in content-oriented XML retrieval, Proceedings of the 28th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, August 15-19, 2005, Salvador, Brazil [doi>10.1145/1076034.1076089]
• 8: Nick Craswell , David Hawking , Stephen Robertson, Effective site finding using link anchor information, Proceedings of the 24th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.250-257, September 2001, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States [doi>10.1145/383952.383999]
• 9: Nick Craswell, David Hawking and Trystan Upstill. TREC12 Web and Interactive Tracks at CSIRO. In The Twelfth Text Retrieval Conference(TREC 2003), 2004.
• 10: Ronald Fagin , Ravi Kumar , Kevin S. McCurley , Jasmine Novak , D. Sivakumar , John A. Tomlin , David P. Williamson, Searching the workplace web, Proceedings of the 12th international conference on World Wide Web, May 20-24, 2003, Budapest, Hungary [doi>10.1145/775152.775204]
• 11: Hui Fang , Tao Tao , ChengXiang Zhai, A formal study of information retrieval heuristics, Proceedings of the 27th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, July 25-29, 2004, Sheffield, United Kingdom [doi>10.1145/1008992.1009004]
• 12: Norbert Fuhr, Probabilistic models in information retrieval, The Computer Journal, v.35 n.3, p.243-255, June 1992 [doi>10.1093/comjnl/35.3.243]
• 13: Norbert Fuhr , Kai Großjohann, XIRQL: a query language for information retrieval in XML documents, Proceedings of the 24th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.172-180, September 2001, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States [doi>10.1145/383952.383985]
• 14: Luis Gravano , Hector Garcia-Molina, Generalizing GlOSS to Vector-Space Databases and Broker Hierarchies, Proceedings of the 21th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, p.78-89, September 11-15, 1995
• 15: Jiawei Han , Micheline Kamber, Data mining: concepts and techniques, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, 2000
• 16: David Hull, Using statistical testing in the evaluation of retrieval experiments, Proceedings of the 16th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.329-338, June 27-July 01, 1993, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/160688.160758]
• 17: Jaap Kamps , Maarten de Rijke , Börkur Sigurbjörnsson, Length normalization in XML retrieval, Proceedings of the 27th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, July 25-29, 2004, Sheffield, United Kingdom [doi>10.1145/1008992.1009009]
• 18: Marcin Kaszkiel , Justin Zobel, Passage retrieval revisited, Proceedings of the 20th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.178-185, July 27-31, 1997, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
• 19: Mounia Lalmas, Dempster-Shafer's theory of evidence applied to structured documents: modelling uncertainty, Proceedings of the 20th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.110-118, July 27-31, 1997, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
• 20: Mounia Lalmas, Uniform representation of content and structure for structured document retrieval. Technical Report, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, 2000.
• 21: Kristina Lerman , Lise Getoor , Steven Minton , Craig Knoblock, Using the structure of Web sites for automatic segmentation of tables, Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, June 13-18, 2004, Paris, France [doi>10.1145/1007568.1007584]
• 22: Bing Liu , Robert Grossman , Yanhong Zhai, Mining data records in Web pages, Proceedings of the ninth ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining, August 24-27, 2003, Washington, D.C. [doi>10.1145/956750.956826]
• 23: Estimating the Usefulness of Search Engines, Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Data Engineering, p.146, March 23-26, 1999
• 24: Amihai Motro , Igor Rakov, Estimating the Quality of Databases, Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems, p.298-307, May 13-15, 1998
• 25: Felix Naumann and Rolker Claudia. Assessment Methods for Information Quality Criteria. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Quality (IQ), Cambridge, MA, 2000.
• 26: Zaiqing Nie , Yuanzhi Zhang , Ji-Rong Wen , Wei-Ying Ma, Object-level ranking: bringing order to Web objects, Proceedings of the 14th international conference on World Wide Web, May 10-14, 2005, Chiba, Japan [doi>10.1145/1060745.1060828]
• 27: Zaiqing Nie, Ji-Rong Wen and Wei-Ying Ma. Object-level Vertical Search. To appear by the Third Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR), 2007.
• 28: Paul Ogilvie , Jamie Callan, Combining document representations for known-item search, Proceedings of the 26th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in informaion retrieval, July 28-August 01, 2003, Toronto, Canada [doi>10.1145/860435.860463]
• 29: S. E. Robertson, S. Walker, S. Jones and M. M. Hancock-Beaulieu. Okapi at TREC-3. In The Third Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 3), 1994.
• 30: Stephen Robertson , Hugo Zaragoza , Michael Taylor, Simple BM25 extension to multiple weighted fields, Proceedings of the thirteenth ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management, November 08-13, 2004, Washington, D.C., USA [doi>10.1145/1031171.1031181]
• 31: Sheila Tejada , Craig A. Knoblock , Steven Minton, Learning domain-independent string transformation weights for high accuracy object identification, Proceedings of the eighth ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining, July 23-26, 2002, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada [doi>10.1145/775047.775099]
• 32: Jiying Wang , Fred H. Lochovsky, Data extraction and label assignment for web databases, Proceedings of the 12th international conference on World Wide Web, May 20-24, 2003, Budapest, Hungary [doi>10.1145/775152.775179]
• 33: Thijs Westerveld, Wessel Kraaij and Djoerd Hiemstra. Retrieving Web Pages using Content, Links, URLs and Anchors. In The Tenth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC2001), 2001.
• 34: Ross Wilkinson, Effective retrieval of structured documents, Proceedings of the 17th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.311-317, July 03-06, 1994, Dublin, Ireland
• 35: Jinxi Xu , Jamie Callan, Effective retrieval with distributed collections, Proceedings of the 21st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.112-120, August 24-28, 1998, Melbourne, Australia [doi>10.1145/290941.290974]
• 36: Yiming Yang , Xin Liu, A re-examination of text categorization methods, Proceedings of the 22nd annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.42-49, August 15-19, 1999, Berkeley, California, United States [doi>10.1145/312624.312647]
• 37: Jun Zhu , Zaiqing Nie , Ji-Rong Wen , Bo Zhang , Wei-Ying Ma, 2D Conditional Random Fields for Web information extraction, Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on Machine learning, p.1044-1051, August 07-11, 2005, Bonn, Germany [doi>10.1145/1102351.1102483]
• 38: Jun Zhu , Zaiqing Nie , Ji-Rong Wen , Bo Zhang , Wei-Ying Ma, Simultaneous record detection and attribute labeling in web data extraction, Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining, August 20-23, 2006, Philadelphia, PA, USA [doi>10.1145/1150402.1150457]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Retrieval models

General Terms:
Algorithms, Experimentation

Keywords:
information extraction, information retrieval, language model, web objects